The energy and excitement in the IBM Z mainframe community during the two years since the announcement of Zowe have not been seen in a generation. By enabling mainframers to work like technologists who work on the cloud, mobile and distributed platforms, Zowe unlocks the power of DevOps for mainframers, ensuring the vitality of the platform for the long-term.
It accomplishes this by opening up the world of enterprise DevOps tools, both familiar and special-purpose ones, for mainframe applications, allowing users to easily create toolchains that include the mainframe. This freedom to leverage any enterprise DevOps tools across the entire deployment pipeline is achieved simply and elegantly.
The Zowe Backstory
The Zowe journey began when Broadcom, at the time CA Technologies, along with IBM and Rocket Software realized the challenges they were hearing from customers—IT isolation, need for increased delivery velocity and recruitment and retention problems—were bigger than any single vendor could solve on its own. The challenges of this scale required an ecosystem-wide response.
So the vendors came together with the Linux Foundation’s Open Mainframe Project to create the open source framework known as Zowe (as in David Bowie, for the uninitiated). The Zowe community operates transparently and welcomes contributions from all in the form of code, enhancement requests, educational content and shared experiences. A virtual meetup held earlier in the year attracted participants from 47 companies from across the mainframe ecosystem.
Traditionally, mainframe application development and operations have been separate from the rest of the IT organization due to specialized processes, roles and tools designed around the platform. While they have served the mainframe community extraordinarily well over the decades, the world outside has changed with demand for ever-shorter software delivery cycles resulting in the DevOps model.
In short, the tipping point has arrived and the time to normalize is now.
What Is Zowe?
Zowe is a modern interface to the mainframe that extends z/OS-based services and tooling to the greater IT landscape, including DevOps. As a framework, it consists of four main components:
- Zowe API Mediation Layer (APIML)
- Zowe Command Line Interface (CLI)
- Zowe Explorer (Visual Studio Code extension)
- Zowe App Framework (UI)
Broadcom is proud to have initially contributed the first three of these components. The first two were created as part of our CA Brightside offering, which won an award for the Most Innovative DevOps solution—yes, a mainframe offering won a DevOps innovation award!
These components provide a modern way of working that supports core DevOps practices such as empowering developers with shift-left testing responsibilities and DevOps engineers with robust automation options.
This article describes the framework’s ability to onboard the mainframe to enterprise DevOps, so developers, systems programmers and others who work with the mainframe can now do so the same way their peers do with other IT platforms (i.e., cloud, mobile, distributed). These shared experiences close the gap between mainframers and others while preserving the core advantages of the platform. Common tools fuel a common language that benefits all, especially when deploying hybrid applications (e.g., web front-end with mainframe back-end).
Through automation and script libraries, Zowe helps reduce the range of mainframe-specific knowledge necessary to be productive, enabling organizations to more easily recruit, onboard and retain the next generation of talent. By using modern DevOps tools and techniques combined with access to “big iron” applications, the next-generation now sees mainframe as an exciting career choice.
Recent milestones achieved by the Zowe community include the launch of the long-term support (LTS) release ensuring the stability and longevity of the framework and a Zowe Conformance program ensuring the interoperability of a growing ecosystem of conformant tools.
The framework drives mainframe DevOps in several ways:
Zowe API Mediation Layer – Discover and Securely Consume
As RESTful APIs become table stakes, the greater the challenge becomes, making those services easily discoverable and consumable in a secure way. The Zowe API Mediation Layer (APIML) addresses this need by exposing mainframe services, ranging from z/OS system level to database/transaction services to tool-based services, through a centralized gateway and catalog.
Conformance of these APIs with the Zowe LTS standard eliminates breaking changes while bringing additional value, including the usability and productivity benefits of single sign-on (SSO).
At Broadcom, we’ve leveraged Zowe to achieve conformance across our product portfolio and have a healthy pipeline of Zowe-conformant products soon to be announced. By spanning the traditional Dev and Ops domains, we’re facilitating true mainframe DevOps adoption—teams can combine their preferred mainframe-native tools with off-platform ones, including ones used by their peers working on other platforms, to optimize speed, quality and productivity.
Zowe CLI – Orchestrate and Automate
For DevOps Engineers and DevOps-savvy self-service developers, CLIs are a “go-to” tool. They use CLIs for a wide range of platforms including AWS and Azure, Git, Kubernetes and so on … why not mainframe? The use of CLIs paves the way for robust, script-based automation, which is a cornerstone of DevOps. The Zowe community already offers some basic scripts, free for anyone to use.
Using a CLI may be new for some, so community members often share tips and tricks to help these users navigate the productivity curve quickly.
Broadcom currently offers a dozen or so CLI extensions to mainframe-native tools, once again spanning the traditional Dev and Ops domains to improve productivity across roles and processes.
Zowe Explorer for VS Code – Visualize and Navigate
Visual Studio Code is exciting for any mainframers editing code, especially developers and sysprogs. While ISPF and Eclipse will remain viable options for the foreseeable future, the extraordinary success of the lightweight VS Code, which is backed by Microsoft, and the rapid emergence of browser-based editors/IDEs expand the range of options. With 11 million users around the globe, VS Code provides an experience users love and a marketplace of 20,000 extensions enabling users to personalize their UX and optimize their workflows.
Zowe Explorer, which streamlines interaction with mainframe data sets, USS files and jobs, is only one of the many VS Code extensions available in the VS Code marketplace for mainframe users (and a successful one with more than 12,000 downloads). Unlike Eclipse extensions, all of the mainframe extensions from Broadcom are free, and many are open-sourced.
In the Queue: SSO/MFA, SDK, Mobile App
The Zowe community has been working diligently on the implementation of SSO and multi-factor authentication (MFA), which eliminates the drudgery of constantly logging on to multiple systems.
Also, software development kits (SDKs) are in the works, the goal of which is to make Zowe services (and by extension, the mainframe) easier to use by providing reusable code for common mainframe operations in popular languages and runtime libraries. The beginnings of a Zowe Node.js SDK and Zowe Python SDK already exist.
Finally, a Zowe mobile app to help systems and operations support staff improve system availability is, like the SDK, being incubated by the community.
Decision Time – Zowe Open Path or Closed, Proprietary
Mainframe teams face a choice: Continue with a vendor-controlled model, in which vendors determine which tools you use and how you work or adopt the open path. While the prescriptive (aka opinionated) approach of the former may have been acceptable for a siloed mainframe, the open approach is the foundation of enterprise DevOps.
As an indication of the early success of the open path, we’ve been delighted to learn about many mainframe shops adopting Zowe on their own, with CI/CD integration and code analysis a common entry point.
For those with reservations about open source, consider the prevalence of Git, Visual Studio Code, Jenkins, SonarQube and so on in the DevOps landscape. Microsoft CEO Nadella recently stated, “We’re all-in on open source” and Zowe co-founder IBM recently acquired Red Hat—more shining examples that open source tools are a trusted part of the technology stack.
Change is never easy, which is why no-fee Design Thinking workshops are available to help adopters prioritize the DevOps use cases enabled by Zowe. Because so many see “open” as the least costly, least risky and fastest path to mainframe modernization, familiarity with Zowe is quickly becoming an industry standard. Ask your vendors if they’re joining the Zowe community and ecosystem.
With ongoing commitment from IBM, Rocket and Broadcom and the guidance and support of the Open Mainframe Project, the excitement around will Zowe continue so join the open mainframe movement!
To learn more about Zowe, visit Zowe.org and the community blog site.
